William Reeve is what he terms a “classic accidental landlord”. The serial entrepreneur didn’t intend to rent out his flat in central London, but had to give it up soon after gaining his first rung on the property ladder. “I got married while I was there and, much as I thought it was the perfect place, it turns out that some compromise was required,” he says.
Instead of keeping it as a pied-à-terre, the flat now offers Reeve an insight into the needs of his customers at online platform Goodlord, which is designed to help lettings agents, landlords and tenants slash the admin time spent on renting.
The difficulties for England’s 11 million renters have arguably never been as acute or high-profile, with official data showing last week that the average rent outside London had hit another record high. The housing sector is under pressure to prove conditions are getting better for tenants in the face of a new government intent to improve renters’ rights, and greater scrutiny of the industry after the death of a two-year-old boy, Awaab Ishak, from mould in a rental property.
Meanwhile, landlords are selling up amid fears of a tax rise in next week’s budget, and some even say they feel more reviled than serial killers.
Reeve, who has run the company since it flirted with collapse in 2018, came to the sector with an eye-catching track record. The sale of his first tech business in 1999, the IT industry analytics firm Fletcher Research, fuelled a run of investments and roles in startups that achieved successful “exits” for investors at healthy valuations.
These included co-founding the travel firm Secret Escapes and sitting on the board of Zoopla. He also chaired wealth manager Nutmeg and snack brand Graze, sold to JP Morgan and Carlyle respectively. Along with a cluster of tech luminaries, he co-founded LoveFilm back in 2002, which was sold to Amazon nearly a decade later in deal that valued it at £200m.
At Goodlord, he may ultimately pull off another big deal as it nears profitability after a tumultuous first decade. The focus is on capturing the market around people relocating between tenancies. “Moving house is such a point of massive stress – which hopefully we can reduce. Lots of decisions need to be made which have financial consequences, which means lots of businesses try to latch on to that moment,” says Reeve.
To this end, it offers everything from help for renters switching broadband and energy contracts to providing an audit trail – particularly tenants’ references – for landlords. Goodlord’s focus is on snaring professional letting agents as clients, “to help make lives easier and keep track of things”. He has “a constant drum beat” of new potential services to consider – from collecting some rental payments to tracking inventories. The platform is used by about 250,000 landlords and more than 500,000 tenants each year.
“We’re trying to turn complicated things that everybody finds a stress and a tedious pain in the backside – such as filling in a long insurance form – into a one-click thing,” he says.
The business, based in east London, showed promise after it was set up by Richard White and Tom Mundy in 2014, but a disastrous tech upgrade left it perilously close to extinction when Reeve was asked to help out six years ago.
He quickly identified that its techies were disconnected from the rank and file, who were housed in a nearby office above a strip club, hollowed out by redundancies. To call attention to the divide, he placed a double bed in the boardroom and called a company-wide meeting. “My argument was, I want that side of the business and that side of the business to start being practically as intimate as being in bed together.
“The kiss of death in my world is when you learn the IT team report to the finance director. I’m the opposite – the techies get a seat at the table. Everything happens through them.”
Now, he says, relentless fundraising has put Goodlord on a stable footing, but several “humps” have appeared in recent years for landlords – tax changes made by George Osborne in 2016 to try to deflate the buy-to-let market, then rising interest rates and finally the renters (reform) bill, which he calls “the big fat straw” breaking the camel’s back. The long-awaited bill will end no-fault evictions and prohibit blanket bans on renting to benefits recipients or people with children and pets.
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“Landlords are looking at the bill thinking: ‘I was fed up [before], I’m not making much money, my mortgage costs have spiked, I’ve been told I have to invest in environmental stuff and now you’re telling me that I have to let people with pets into my house – you know what, I’m done.’ What it is doing is pissing landlords off, and that’s going to make the market a tougher place for tenants.” Reeve says the effect has been that some smaller landlords are selling up to larger outfits.
He believes rent controls are a “terrible” idea, adding: “It sounds like the magic bullet but just makes matters worse … the market [as it is] may be unsatisfactory but it’s the least unsatisfactory of all the alternatives. You have to be careful about tilting it all in one direction.”
As a teenager, he was a “computer geek” and quickly learned a lesson in market uncertainty. At 16, he developed a game called Pipeline, set on a North Sea oil rig. As he prepared to launch, the Piper Alpha disaster killed 167 workers on a rig in 1988 off the coast of Aberdeen. The game was re-set on a space station and proved a success. But a “money-motivated” Reeve shunned the industry, taking on a job at IBM and spawning a tech-dominated career.
Reeve has notched up more than 50 investments in his career, including business banking firm Tide, jobs site Adzuna and tiny gigs specialist Sofar Sounds. Might Goodlord be the next big deal for the exit king?
“We’re not in a hurry,” Reeves says. “We’re through the fundraising woods.” He adds that “exits are usually created out of opportunities”, when a deal is preferable to a commercial partnership with complementary companies. “Those opportunities may well happen.”
CV
Age 51
Family “Australian wife and family, British father, American mother, so Anglosphere extended family. No kids.”
Pay “Rather hard to say because much of it is in stock options, whose value is very hard to calculate.”
Education MEng in engineering, economics and management from Oxford University, where he won a scholarship.
Last holiday A week in Cephalonia with his UK family.
Best advice he’s been given “To be more ambitious.”
Biggest career mistake “I’ve had a couple of opportunities to move to the US – first to study and then through the sale of my first business to a Boston-based company – but didn’t. That may have been a mistake, looking at the advantages US tech businesses have and the valuations they achieve.”
Phrase he overuses “‘To be honest’ – I don’t say it much but saying it even once is once too many – I am always honest!”
How he relaxes “Listening to music – mostly unfashionably old pop/rock/dance music, being near water, and eating out with friends, almost anywhere.”
